Moxie Marlinspike offers a privacy-friendly alternative to ChatGPT

If you’re even remotely concerned about your privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants may seem alarming. It is difficult to use personal information held by a model’s parent company without sharing it. OpenAI is already testing ads, so it’s easy to imagine the same data collection that fuels Facebook and Google creeping into chatbot conversations.

A new project launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike shows what a privacy-aware AI service could look like. Confer is designed to look and feel similar to ChatGPT and Claude, but with a backend configured to avoid data collection and an open source rigor that makes Signal more reliable. Confer conversations cannot be used to train models or target ads. This is for the simple reason that the host cannot access them.

For Marlinspike, these protections are a response to the intimate nature of the service.

“This is a type of technology that actively encourages confessions,” Marlinspike said. “Chat interfaces like ChatGPT know more about people than any other technology to date. When you combine this with advertising, it’s like someone paying a therapist to convince them to buy something.”

Ensuring privacy requires multiple different systems to work together.

First, Confer uses the WebAuthn passkey system to encrypt messages sent to and from your system. (Unfortunately, this standard works best on mobile devices or Macs running Sequoia, but it can also be made to work on Windows or Linux using a password manager.) On the server side, all of Confer’s inference processing runs in a trusted execution environment (TEE), with a remote authentication system in place to verify that the system has not been compromised. Within it is a set of open-weight foundational models that handle any queries received.

The result is much more complex than a standard inference setup (which is already quite complex), but it fulfills Confer’s fundamental promise to its users. As long as these protections are in place, you can have confidential conversations with your model without any information being compromised.

Confer’s free tier is limited to 20 messages and 5 active chats per day. Users who pay $35 per month get unlimited access, along with more advanced models and personalization. This is considerably more expensive than ChatGPT’s Plus plan, but privacy doesn’t come cheap.